Economic archaeology and ancient economic history have boomed the past decades. The former thanks to greatly enhanced techniques to identify, collect, and interpret material remains as proxies for economic interactions and performance; the latter by embracing the frameworks of new institutional economics. Both disciplines, however, still have great difficulty talking with each other. There is no reliable method to convert ancient proxy-data into the economic indicators used in economic history. In turn, the shared cultural belief-systems underlying institutions and the symbolic ways in which these are reproduced remain invisible in the material record. This book explores ways to bring both disciplines closer together by building a theoretical and methodological framework to evaluate and integrate archaeological proxy-data in economic history research. Rather than the linear interpretations offered by neoclassical or neomalthusian models, we argue that complexity economics, based on system theory, offers a promising way forward.
Author(s): Koenraad Verboven
Series: Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 364
City: Cham
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Graphs
List of Tables
Chapter 1: Introduction: Finding a New Approach to Ancient Proxy Data
1 What This Book Is About
2 A Brief Survey of the Chapters
Bibliography
Part I: Theoretical Frameworks and Methodologies
Chapter 2: Playing by Whose Rules? Institutional Resilience, Conflict and Change in the Roman Economy
1 Framing the Problem
2 Institutions and Institutional Change
3 Social System Theory
4 Impact of Empire
4.1 Changing Designed Institutions
4.2 Changing Social Rule Sets
5 Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Networks as Proxies: A Relational Approach Towards Economic Complexity in the Roman Period
1 Systems, Complexity and Networks
1.1 The Relational Approach: How to Model and Analyse Networks and to Measure Their Complexity
1.2 Example: A Riverine Transport Network from Roman Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages
2 The Complex Network of the Roman Empire: A Macro-Perspective
2.1 “Complex” Debates on the Roman Economy
2.2 Modelling the Imperial Traffic System: The “ORBIS Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World”
2.3 A Network of Places and Commodities on the Basis of One Piece of Textual Evidence
2.4 Micro-Perspectives and Qualitative Approaches of Network Analysis
3 Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Evaluating the Potential of Computational Modelling for Informing Debates on Roman Economic Integration
1 Introduction
2 Temin’s Roman Market Economy
3 Critiques of Temin’s Approach
4 MERCURY as a Base-Model
5 Extending MERCURY with a Transport Costs Variable
6 Experiment Design
7 Results
8 Discussion and Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Visualising Roman Institutional Environments for Exchange as a Complex System
1 Introduction
2 Complexity and Economics
3 Visualising Complexity
4 Visualising Ancient Economies
5 Money in Roman Law: A Diagram of Complex Mechanism
6 Legal Institutions in a System of Multi-traditions: A Causal Loop Diagram
7 Conclusions
Bibliography
Part II: Urban Systems
Chapter 6: Social Complexity and Complexity Economics: Studying Socio-economic Systems at Düzen Tepe and Sagalassos (SW Turkey)
1 Introduction
2 A Framework of Socio-economic Complexity
3 Methodology
4 Results: Socio-economic Systems at Düzen Tepe and Sagalassos
4.1 Resource Procurement and Exploitation
4.2 Production Processes and Output
4.3 Structures of Exchange
5 Discussion: Approximating Socio-economic Complexity
Bibliography
Chapter 7: A Method for Estimating Roman Population Sizes from Urban Survey Contexts: An Application in Central Adriatic Italy
1 Introduction
2 Issues and Guidelines in Calculating Town Populations
3 Urban Survey Data from Central Adriatic Italy
3.1 Potentia
3.2 Trea
3.3 Private Architecture
4 Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 8: Complexity and Urban Hierarchy of Ancient Urbanism: The Cities of Roman Asia Minor
1 Complexity, Scaling and Cities
2 Towards Defining Cities in Asia Minor
3 Complexity and the Urban Pattern
4 Complexity Within the Cities: Spread of Public Buildings
5 The Urban Hierarchy
6 Towards Greater Complexity: A Discussion
Appendix: Figures
Bibliography
Part III: Epidemics
Chapter 9: Disease Proxies and the Diagnosis of the Late Antonine Economy
1 Price Proxies and Plague
2 Wages, the Military and Plague Mortality
3 Conclusion: On Proxies and Quantification
Bibliography
Chapter 10: Measuring and Comparing Economic Interaction Based on the Paths and Speed of Infections: The Case Study of the Spread of the Justinianic Plague and Black Death
1 Introduction
2 The Black Death
2.1 The Spread of the Black Death
2.2 How Did the Black Death Spread?
2.3 A Quantitative Approach to Study the Spread of the Black Death
3 The Justinianic Plague
3.1 The Spread of the Justinianic Plague
3.2 What Determined the Spread of the Justinianic Plague?
4 A Comparative Perspective
4.1 The Determinants of the Justinianic Plague, a Quantitative Perspective
4.2 A Comparative Perspective Over Time
4.3 A Comparative Discussion of the Differences in Speed of Transmission
5 Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
